North Carolina drinking water not just polluted with coal ash, arsenic discovered too

Two weeks ago 82,000 TONS of coal ash spilled from the flimsiest container ever built by man to flood the rivers of North Carolina. Coal ash is ridiculously toxic and full of cancer-causing heavy metals amongst other nasty things. In some parts of NC there are five foot tall piles of toxic waste on the banks of rivers.

It looks bad.

And yesterday officials discovered another leaking pipe, this one pouring arsenic into the drinking water.

More than two weeks after a stormwater pipe burst caused 82,000 tons of coal ash to spill into a North Carolina river that supplies drinking water, state officials have discovered that a second pipe is leaking water with elevated amounts of arsenic — and they’re not sure how long it has been happening.

The North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) on Tuesday ordered Duke Energy, the company responsible for the spill, to immediately halt discharges from another leaking 36-inch stormwater pipe beneath an unlined coal ash pond at a decommissioned power plant in Eden, North Carolina. The agency discovered the second spill after requesting video recordings of the inside of Duke’s other stormwater pipes from the former plant.

“When we learned there was a second pipe, we recognized there was a potential for leaks there,” DENR spokesperson Jamie Kritzer told ThinkProgress. “Duke had been running their own video [through the stormwater pipes] prior to us saying anything about it, but we asked for a copy of it.”